When, at Texas State Society parties or other Washington social functions, her husband bellowed orders at her across the room, or insulted her, she never showed anything, either. She would sit silently, or say simply, “Yes, Lyndon,” or “I’ll be glad to, Lyndon,” and she would do so as calmly as if the request had been polite and reasonable. People might say to one another, “I don’t know how she stands it,” but she stood it—and she stood it with a dignity that his shouts and sarcasms could not rattle, a dignity that was rather remarkable. But most acquaintances didn’t really notice this. Their attitude toward Lady Bird Johnson was influenced by her husband’s attitude toward her. She never tried to talk very much, of course, and when she did, she wasn’t listened to very much. She was just a drab little woman whom nobody noticed.
AS FOR POLITICS, apart from entertaining her husband’s guests and his constituents she had no connection at all with this major activity of his life.
During her husband’s campaign for Congress in 1937—he had been unopposed in 1938 and 1940—she had, as always, had a welcoming smile and a warm meal for him and his aides at all hours of the night. But when, occasionally, someone—someone who didn’t know her well—raised the possibility that she herself might campaign, the very suggestion that she might have to face an audience and speak brought such panic to her face that the suggestion was always quickly dropped. Sometimes she could not avoid standing in a receiving line at a reception for the Congressman—and although she would shake hands and chat with the strangers filing by, she would perform this chore with so obvious an effort that her friends felt sorry for her as they watched; the bright smile on her face would be as rigid as if it had been set in stone.
The 1941 Senate campaign was little different. She learned of her husband’s decision to run only after the decision had been made; he didn’t bother to tell her until after the press conference at which he told the public. Then he flew down to Texas to begin the campaign; Mrs. Johnson followed by car, so unessential was her participation considered. Having purchased a movie camera, she took pictures of Lyndon as he gave speeches, but they were for showing at home, not for use in the campaign. “I went around with my little camera, cranking,” she was to say many years later. As she said this, she held up an imaginary camera in an amateurish way and pantomimed turning the crank, and as she did so, she hunched over a little, portraying—vividly—a timid little woman hanging back at the edge of a crowd, pointing a camera at her husband. Whatever she looked like to others, that was what Lady Bird Johnson looked like to herself. Did she have any other role in the campaign? “I packed suitcases and got clothes washed, and tried to see that Lyndon always had clothes; every day Lyndon went through three or four or five shirts. Traveling with him, trying to get him to eat a regular meal, or taking his messages. Just being on hand in his hotel to answer the phone so he can take a shower. And sitting on the platform at all the big rallies.” And the few words she had to say on the rare—very rare—occasions when she represented her husband at a minor event (“Thank you very much for inviting me to this barbecue. Lyndon is very sorry he couldn’t be here”) were such an ordeal that they made her friends cringe. Her single attempt to contribute something more ended in embarrassment. She had been making big pitchers of lemonade, and baking batches of cookies, and lugging them to the campaign volunteers working in various offices around Austin, and she decided that on these visits, in order to thank the volunteers for their efforts and to spur them on to more, “I would give this little speech to them: ‘Every single vote counts.’ ” She wrote and rewrote the few paragraphs of that brief talk, memorized it and nerved herself up to give it. But she evidently repeated it too many times. Meeting her on the street one day, a friend smilingly began to quote her speech back to her, and since the friend was not a campaign worker, Lady Bird felt that her speech had become a joke quoted around Austin. That was the end of her speechmaking in that campaign. Forty years later, she was to tell the author of this book that when the friend quoted her speech back to her, she realized, “Maybe it had made the rounds. I guess I gave the speech too often.” Hearing a change in her voice as she spoke, I glanced up from my notepad. Mrs. Johnson was at that time sixty-eight years old. Her face was lowered, and she was blushing—a definite, dark red blush—at the memory of that humiliation so many years earlier.
As for the less public side of the campaign—the planning of strategy and tactics—the planners say that the candidate’s wife was almost never present. “Well,” she says, “I elected to be out a lot.” Asked why, she replied: “I wasn’t confident in that field.” Was there also another reason? “I didn’t want to be a party to absolutely everything,” Lady Bird Johnson says.
BACK IN WASHINGTON after the campaign, she had a new apartment, in the Woodley Park Towers off Connecticut Avenue, much more spacious than the Kalorama Road apartment and with a living room that, she recalls, “just hung over Rock Creek Park, and was just filled with green.” But an apartment wasn’t what she wanted. “I had been yearning and talking about having a home,” she recalls. The Johnsons had been spending about six months of the year in Austin, and every year they seemed to be living in a different apartment there—small and temporary. And in Washington, more and more of their friends were buying homes. “The central theme of my heart’s desire was a house,” she recalls, but there was no money to buy one. She and Lyndon had wanted children, but after seven years of marriage there were no children; she had had three miscarriages. In an attempt to solve what she describes as a “gynecological problem,” she underwent an operation in Baltimore in September, 1941, but it did not appear to have been successful. “This was a sadness,” she remembers, and changes the subject. But sometimes, despite herself, her sorrow slipped out; an old friend was to remember chatting with Lady Bird at this time, about other topics; every so often Lady Bird would pause, and a wistful look would cross her face, and she would say, “If I had a son …” or “If I had a daughter …” During the Fall of 1941, she was still taking constituents to Mount Vernon—she was to say she stopped counting after her two-hundredth trip—and she was very tired of those trips. Nellie Connally says, “She was like a sightseeing bus. That’s what congressional wives did: they hauled the constituents around.” During that Fall, she still entertained constituents at dinners—dinners at which her guests paid little attention to her. Anxious for something else to do, she enrolled, with Nellie, in a business school in Arlington, taking courses in shorthand and typing; years later, Mrs. Johnson, almost always careful not to say a derogatory word about anything, would say of the business school: “That was a dull, drab little place.” And all during that Fall, the weekends at Longlea continued, as did the Texas parties at which her husband ridiculed her, or shouted orders at her. “The women liked her,” Nellie Connally says. “Every woman sympathized with her. If they didn’t like her for herself—and they did—they liked her because they saw what she had to put up with. It made what they had to put up with not so bad.”
And then, after Pearl Harbor, when her husband, along with John Connally and Willard Deason, was preparing to leave on his first trip to the Coast, Lyndon said that she might as well get some use out of her typing classes and took her along to type his letters. Telephoning his congressional office every evening, he was told about problems in the district: about federal installations for which he had obtained preliminary approval before his departure—a big Air Force base for Austin, an Army camp in Bastrop County, a new rural electrification line—but that were now stalled in the federal bureaucracy; about scores of businessmen whose plans for construction or expansion of factories were stalled by lack of necessary approvals from federal agencies such as the new War Production Board and the Office of Strategic Materials; about letters and telephone calls—hundreds of letters and telephone calls—from constituents about routine pre-war matters, and about new war-related problems. There was no one to handle these problems. In Connally, Walter Jenkins and the brilliant speechwriter Herbert
Henderson, Johnson had possessed an exceptional staff, but Jenkins had enlisted in September, Henderson had suddenly, unexpectedly died in October, and Connally’s departure left no one in Suite 1320 of the House Office Building except apple-cheeked Mary Rather—charming, efficient, but only a secretary—and O. J. Weber, bright and aggressive but only twenty-one years old and with just a few months’ experience. And the problems had to be handled quickly. If final authorization for the new military bases in the Tenth District was not pushed through, some other congressman would snap up the bases for his district. If constituents didn’t get the necessary assistance in Washington, the feeling would spread that there was no one in the district’s congressional office except secretaries, that the district was without adequate representation in Washington—at a time when a congressman was needed with particular urgency. Johnson had no idea how long he would be away from Washington, and if his absence was to be prolonged, voters might begin asking why he didn’t resign his seat and let the district elect a new congressman. The political danger was real—and imminent. Let dissatisfaction mount and, with an election scheduled for July 25, 1942, he might, if he didn’t resign, be replaced. Someone had to take over the office, to be in effect, in all but name, the Congressman from the Tenth District until the real Congressman returned. Someone had to handle a congressman’s multi-faceted chores: to persuade Cabinet officers and high-level bureaucrats to cut through red tape and get the big projects moving again, to negotiate with the new wartime agencies on behalf of businessmen, to serve as the necessary link between constituents and federal agencies. Discussing the situation out on the Coast, Johnson, Connally and Deason agreed that choosing an ambitious young politician or lawyer from Austin, who might become a possible rival, was too risky. Moreover, the choice had to be someone who was not only totally loyal but who would provide a sense of continuity, someone who would make the district feel that the office was being run as if Lyndon Johnson were still there running it; someone, therefore, who was identified with Lyndon Johnson. It is unclear which of the men first suggested that the best choice—perhaps the only choice—was Mrs. Lyndon Johnson; she thinks it was Deason whom, to her astonishment, she first heard mention her name. Her husband at first dismissed the idea, but the more it was discussed, the clearer it became that it was the only solution. On their return to Washington, Johnson learned that he and Connally would soon be leaving again, on a trip whose duration was indefinite. He told Lady Bird she would have to do the job. And when, on January 29, 1942, he and Connally left for the Coast again, Lady Bird Johnson went to Suite 1320.
HER HUSBAND didn’t make it easy for her. He did not, in fact, give her much of a vote of confidence before the staff; he appears, in fact, to have been unable to bring himself to tell Miss Rather and Weber that she was to be in charge of the office. He told her to write him daily letters listing the projects she was working on, and to leave wide margins, so that he could put instructions next to each item, but he told Weber and Miss Rather to write letters, too, and left the impression with them that he wanted them to report to him on how Lady Bird was doing.
At first, she didn’t behave as though she was in charge. Confidence was a scarce commodity for Lady Bird Johnson. Asked years later about her early days in the office, she replies: “I was determined, and I wanted to learn. And I was scared.” She went on attending business school in the mornings, and in the office she downplayed her role, to make it appear to the two secretaries that she was on a level with them: although she sat at her husband’s desk as he had instructed her to do, she moved a typing table and a typewriter in beside his chair, and began to share the typing with the two secretaries—who at first treated her as a sort of apprentice secretary; there is a faintly patronizing note to Weber’s report, in a letter he wrote to Johnson a week after she began working, that “Lady Bird is very industrious about her shorthand and typing at school.” She let Mary Rather, who had experience doing it, make most of the calls to the departments and agencies.
But that changed.
Things weren’t being done the way Lyndon would have wanted, she felt. She was signing all the letters from the office, and, reading them, she was finding misspellings. When she asked Mary and O.J. to correct them, they would correct them in handwriting, and the letters looked, she felt, rather sloppy. Lyndon had never let letters go out like that: one mistake, no matter how minor, and the whole letter had to be retyped, no matter how many times it had been retyped before. And she could not blind herself to the fact that insufficient progress was being made on the projects Lyndon would normally be pushing through the bureaucracy, and that complaints were already beginning to be heard from constituents; Weber himself was to report that “some people were already hollering that Lyndon Johnson had gone off of the job and his work wasn’t being taken care of.” She knew how important the efficient operation of his office was for the man she loved so deeply. And for her, too. Both of their lives were wholly bound up in his career. In her mind, he was at war—at any moment he might be facing the enemy; if he was actually having “an interesting time up and down the West Coast,” some of it with Alice Glass, Lady Bird appears not to have been aware of that—and he should be spared worries about the office. That was the least she could do for him.
She knew, for she had heard their complaints over the years, how bitterly Lyndon’s various secretaries resented being made to retype letters over and over again for minor mistakes. It was very hard for her to insist that Weber and Miss Rather retype letters over and over again. But she felt that it was necessary that she do so. And she did. Once, after she had handed a number of letters back to Weber for what she recalls as “small misspellings,” she emerged unexpectedly from her office to find him smacking his fist on his desk in anger. But when he submitted another letter with a mistake, she handed it back to him.
She did things much more difficult—for there were people in Washington more formidable than Weber and Miss Rather.
“There was no doubt about it: O.J. and Mary knew more than I ever would,” she recalls, “but I had one advantage. I had Lyndon’s name, and he had a network of friends in the departments … and I could get my feet in the door when sometimes a secretary couldn’t.” “I had a complete picture of my complete lack of experience,” she adds, “but I also had a feeling that nobody cares quite as much as you do about your business, and next to you, your wife.… They knew more, but perhaps I cared a bit more.” She told O.J. and Mary that she would not be doing any more typing; from now on, she said, she would sign the letters they typed, and handle as many of the calls from the constituents as possible—and she would be dealing with the departments and agencies herself. And, she said, she would be getting in earlier in the mornings; she wouldn’t be going to business school any longer.
Dealing with the departments and agencies. Corcoran and Rowe, and Lyndon’s other friends in Washington, could make sure that agency heads and other high administrative officials accepted her telephone calls and, if a visit in person was necessary, could get her in to see them. But Corcoran and Rowe couldn’t help her once she was in. For the previous twenty-nine years of her life, Lady Bird Johnson had never been able to make people listen to her, much less persuade them to do things for her.
She had to make them listen now.
Sometimes, when Lady Bird had an important call to make, Mary Rather, glancing into her office, would see her sitting at her husband’s big desk, in her husband’s big chair, “looking as if she would rather have done anything in the world rather than pick up that phone and dial.”
But she always picked it up.
And if a phone call wasn’t enough, if she had to go to see an official in person, she went to see him—even if the official was a Cabinet officer, even if the official was the most feared of Cabinet officers, Harold Ickes, the tart-tongued, terrible-tempered Old Curmudgeon himself. “There were some real scary moments,” Lady Bird Johnson would recall forty years later. “One time I had to go and see that formi
dable man, Mr. Ickes.” At parties, she had dreaded exchanging even a few words of social chatter with him; now she had to ask him to revoke an order relocating a CCC camp, and explain why, for political reasons, it should be revoked. But Ickes’ secretary didn’t keep her waiting too long under the giant moosehead that hung over visitors in his anteroom at the Department of the Interior, and when she was ushered in, “he really couldn’t have been nicer.” Peering at her over the top of his rimless spectacles, he listened to her story, and then said simply that he would look into the matter. But hardly had she returned to the office when there was a telephone call from one of Ickes’ assistants. The matter had been worked out as Mrs. Johnson had requested, the assistant said.
DURING THE TEN WEEKS he and Connally were touring the West Coast, Johnson would sometimes telephone, and there was a constant stream of mail—her letters returned with Lyndon’s orders in the wide margins, and letters he wrote with more detailed instructions—and the instructions at first were those that would be given to a political novice. At one point, he even complained to Weber about his wife: “Since she doesn’t get pay she is irregular in writing, and I can’t fire her—Can’t you and Mary help me by persuasive reminders to write daily.” Only a few paragraphs from his letters are known—Mrs. Johnson has not released the rest—but from this handful, the tone appears to have changed. When, as he had been leaving for the Coast, he had told her to write personal notes to key supporters in the district, he had done so with misgivings, but after copies of the first batch arrived, he wrote her, “Your letters are splendid.… I don’t think I have ever sent any better letters out of my office.” And when she began making occasional suggestions, he could hardly help starting to notice that they usually contained considerable insight, if not into politics, then into human beings; for example, they had decided jointly that she should include in her letters to constituents a reference to the fact that she was working without salary, but now she said she thought that was wrong—too self-serving. “I agree with you,” he wrote. He wanted her to do more work, and more, and more—because, he wrote her, if she could do enough, “we would be invincible. Think of the effect it would have if 2,000 of our best friends in the District had personal notes from you written at the rate of 25 a day for sixty days. I don’t know how you are going to find time to do all this and still take the people to lunch that I want you to take, and see the people in the evening that you must see, but I guess with your methodical planning you can work it out.” There may have been some resistance in the office to taking orders from her, but on March 1 he sent a letter of “instruction about the staff’s future responsibilities,” and had her read it to the staff, and after that there was no question about who was in charge. Then, after ten weeks, he returned and learned almost immediately that he was going to the South Pacific; sitting at his desk, he wrote out his will leaving everything to her, had O.J. and Mary witness it, and left. “I remember how handsome he looked in his Navy overcoat,” Lady Bird says.
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